Progressing with the Process Designer
Comments (2)K2 first released its silverlight based process designer with the blackpoint product. It was probably the first ever workflow process designer built using silverlight for SharePoint.
With the upcoming K2 release called 4.5 a comprehensive update to this designer is in the works. I have been playing with the beta and the silverlight designer experience can only be described as “pure joy!”.
It is so intuitive, simple and visually pleasing. I have all the bits and pieces I need just there in front of me nicely organised : User browser, Inline Functions, SmartObjects, Datafields, SharePoint columns, New wizards, etc.
I have process templates, Sharing of process maps, Exporting to the K2 studio designer, and process guides if I get stuck. Needless to say I am impressed with this version.
The Silverlight process designer in K2 does pack a punch and I think the progress made on with this in 4.5 alone is going to help the SharePoint Application platform to really shine.
Happy New year 2010! and a new K2 release is upon us…
I have been playing with K2 4.5 betas during the holidays and I cant wait for this to be released. I will do a bit more digging and come out with a decent blog post shortly.
Building a help desk system with K2
A casestudy on K2 being used for building a help desk system has been published recently. City of Charlotte in North Carolina, USA used K2 blackpearl to build a help desk system on top of SharePoint, InfoPath and SQL Server 2008.
“After evaluating more than a dozen software offerings, the City of Charlotte chose K2 blackpearl because of its ease of use, scalability, the visibility it provides and its integration with Microsoft Office SharePoint”
The below quote highlights the key differentiator of K2:
“We also went with K2, in part, because of the growth it affords us. It’s hard to find software that lets you expand and retrofit the way K2 blackpearl does. It is customizable, too, so you get more than what comes out of the box.”
read more about it here
Automating Subject Selections
We had been busy working on a number of K2 based SharePoint Applications for our customers and one of those has been published as a case study recently – here’s more info
5.7.1 Unable to relay
Recently, I had a K2 process sending notifications when escalations occur. This was done by sending an email to a gateway. During testing I started encountering email relay issues. The error log on my process portal stated that “Mailbox unavailable. The server response was: 5.7.1 Unable to relay for…”
A quick visit to my SharePoint central admin page revealed that they were using a different SMTP server to mine. I used an SMTP server picked up by the blackpoint installer.
The email relay error usually comes to light when you start sending emails to users outside your domain. This behavior is a good thing. So, how do you work with this issue? You need to have permissions for relaying. Sort that out with the sys admins. Then use the correct SMTP server for relaying from a valid from email address. 
